As has so frequently been the case in the past, plot twists I come up with for my books end up being the same gambits real-life actors concoct and then pull off in the real world. And why not? We all have access to the same information. And, sadly, the lack of interest so many IT vendors and network owners have in security leaves way to many opportunities there for the taking. It’s not so much low hanging fruit as piles of coconuts you have to thread your way through to avoid tripping over them.
So it was no surprise for me to read an article recently in the New York Times revealing that representatives of the Russian Federation’s Federal Securities Service have joined a global standards development group developing – what else – security standards for blockchains. If you’d like to read what that’s all about, as well as my observations on what the Times gets right and what it missed out on entirely, you can find my blog post on that topic at my other site here.
Da.
The US dollar is the global reserve currency. This means that the US more or less controll global finance and the movements of capital. Both the Russians and Chinese want to get out under that rule. Both are amassing gold in enourmous quantities of gold for setting up an alternative system. Russia is working hard to set up an alernative financial center. They once even claimed to have thwarted a US cyber attack on their banking system that tried to sabotage their plans.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/12/cyber-attacks-major-banks-thwarted-russia-161209164616381.html
Blockchains would be a very logical step in getting out under the US financial control. Actually, there is no reason to look for some devious motives. For the Russians, a secure blockchain would be much more valuable than one with a backdoor someone else could discover.
Rob,
I haven’t followed the Russian crypto scene on a daily basis, but I was aware that there have been rumors of the Russian government coming out with a crypto-ruble. Here’s an example: https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/cryptoruble/
Russia seems to be more receptive than countries like China, although where they’ll come out on the regulatory front still seems to be a bit fluid: https://www.coindesk.com/russia-eyes-summer-deadline-new-cryptocurrency-laws/
An official crypto-ruble didn’t appeal to me as much as the route I’ve taken, as the idea of using a faux-private sector crypto coin to get around sanctions seemed to be not only more intrinsically interesting, but a way to play around with two significantly different situations. Otherwise, it would just be BankCoin with a Russian accent.
Interestingly enough, when I first started playing around with the idea of a blockchain book and was trying to come up with a central motive for the bad guy, I considered having someone try to amass a huge amount of gold, or to corner the gold market, using an attack on the financial markets to drive up its value. But for a variety of reasons I moved on from that to the current plot.
Good ideas seem to crop up clusters. It’s their time or something, synchronicity or serendipity, both as close as kissing cousins. Another thing creeping to the world is algorithms of tremendous power and reach for searches – any well worded query is bound to bring things into the light from very diverse sources of expertise. If not this week then next.
And with your comment above why would they, the Russians or anyone else for that matter, put all their eggs in one basket because churn caused by trading and hoarding this new type of currency would generate quite handsome profits only available at scale.
New book: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610833/explainer-what-is-a-blockchain/
Thanks, Frank
This is what the explanations of bit coin/blockchain feel like to the average person:
My brain hurt after watching that